Today, the IOTA Foundation announced the launch of its decentralized marketplace for automated trading of goods and services. It hopes to enable secure, feeless, and industry neutral trade in one platform. The marketplace utilizes distributed ledger technology (DLT) in its decentralized IDs (DIDs), digital contracts, and audit logs.
A key selling point of the platform is automation and machine to machine communication, linking in with the Foundation’s Internet of Things (IoT) focus. Instead of trusting a central authority, the marketplace provides trust in cryptographic proof. This paves the way for automatic trading between devices with digital contracts.
Dr Jörg Nagel, the MD of founding participant Neoception, explained how the platform could be used for selling data between businesses. Say a network of sensors measuring temperature data puts its information on the decentralized market. A weather forecast provider could request specific data for a specified period.
Then, “they can agree on the price for the year for the data, subscribe to the data, use the data to compute a new weather model with the optimized forecast,” Nagel said.
Furthermore, the forecast provider could “later on, use this knowledge to again offer [it] at the marketplace for other services who need the precise weather forecast.”
The platform could also be used by consumers to, for instance, book a ride in a self-driving taxi. Their location and destination are sent to the marketplace in a machine-readable contract. Then, autonomous cars bid on the contract. The winner picks up the consumer, who pays the taxi service through the marketplace with its integrated payment system.
The Foundation sees applications in manufacturing trade, software, and data including micropayments for small amounts of information.
Rather than a linear blockchain, IOTA uses a directed acyclic graph, known as the Tangle. The firm claims this technology, powering the marketplace, is faster and cheaper than alternatives.
Holger Köther, Director of Partnerships of the IOTA Foundation, said: “The use of the IOTA Tangle, an open-source distributed ledger technology that is feeless and scalable, ensures stability and robustness for the Marketplace and its participants.”
Neither the author nor any Ledger Insights’ team members own IOTA tokens
